New Feature: Contact User on Kaggle

It's not a coincidence that many of the winners of Kaggle competitions are teams rather than individuals. Just as competition drives us to continually improve our models, having collaborators motivates us to keep learning and exploring new ideas that are out of our intellectual comfort-zone (not to mention having someone to split the data-munging with). Some teams consist of Kagglers who know each other offline, students at the same university or departmental colleagues, but many of the strongest collaborations are people who have connected through the forums while working on the data in different countries or continents. We want to make it easier for Kagglers to forge these connections while protecting the privacy of everyone involved.

This Friday, Contact-User will go live across the Kaggle website. This feature will allow you to send a one-on-one message to another Kaggle user. The recipient will be able to see the sender's email address, but the sender will not see the address of the recipient.This feature is designed to facilitate personal introductions rather than support fully anonymous chats. It can be used to initiate contact with potential team-mates, or to move personal forum discussions offline. It's also a great excuse to go back and flesh out your Kaggle profile, so potential team-mates can learn about your skills and expertise.

Our goal was to make it as easy as possible to initiate contact with another Kaggler, and as simple as possible to opt-out of messaging or report abuse. We’ve turned this option ON by default to encourage team-formation. To opt-out of private messaging entirely, just click the checkbox on your Edit Profile screen. If your receive messages that you feel are spammy or inappropriate, click the Report Abuse link, and we will investigate the complaint and take corrective action as necessary. Your email address will never be revealed to a sender unless you choose to reply to their message.

One of the best parts about working at Kaggle has been getting to interact with data scientists all over the world, and I've been overwhelmingly impressed with the quality of debate and idea exchange on the forums. We've heard your voices and now want to make it easier for you to hear each other.

PS- You know you're a really old-skool Kaggler if you read this and thought "Didn't there used to be private messaging on Kaggle??" Yes, in the ancient days of 2010, when Kaggle was still written in php and there were geese on the logo, there was an out-of-the-box message feature that didn't make the cut when the entire site was rebuilt from the ground up. The logo-geese will not be returning, but we decided that user-to-user contact should make a comeback.

Is it possible to add a feature that will list all users from a given country. I would be happy to contact and even meet other users from my country, but at the moment it's really difficult to find them.

Chris

Interesting idea! We're working on a number of changes to profiles, and we'll definitely keep this idea in mind. Unfortunately I can't give you a date on when it might be available, but we'll do our best to take it into account in the next 3-4 weeks.